FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT HURRICANE GUSTAV - PAGE 5

By universal consensus, this time New Orleans got it right. Officials successfully emptied the city ahead of Hurricane Gustav, in stark contrast to the nearly 100,000 residents left behind when Katrina struck in 2005. And the newly fortified levees protecting the city held fast against the storm surge, unlike during Katrina when the flood walls failed and 80 percent of the city was inundated. That's the good news. But it also could be the bad news. That's because many of the city's 300,000 evacuees, spurred to leave by Mayor Ray Nagin's dire prediction that Gustav would be "the mother of all storms," are distressed at being stranded hundreds of miles from home for what turned out to be pretty much a false alarm.

About 40 miles farther inland from here, around the periphery of one of America's most vulnerable major cities, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is engaged in a furious $15 billion construction effort to rebuild the ring of concrete levees and steel floodgates that are supposed to protect New Orleans from catastrophic flooding when the next big hurricane blows ashore. But the front line in the epic and unending battle to keep the Gulf of Mexico from pouring into the below-sea-level bathtub in which New Orleans lies is really right here, along a 6-foot-high earthen berm originally built by a farmer to keep his cattle pasture dry. The embankment is all that stands between the yawning ocean and the thin finger of sinking land known as Plaquemines Parish, yet it is so fragile no one dares drive a pickup truck on top of it. The soil from which it was made crumbles like soft meatloaf in your hands.

The howling wind at my window woke me at 6 a.m. Monday, but it wasn't Hurricane Gustav that worried me next. It was Internet traffic as the storm clawed ashore in coastal Louisiana. Faced with the kind of story that spans hundreds of miles, the Tribune is experimenting with online citizen reporting under the watchful gaze of seasoned journalists. But after conversing with Gulf Coast residents on the social networking site Twitter -- creating the online persona "GustavReporter" to do it -- I found myself with 670 followers Monday, and also a duty as the storm rolled by to pass along the facts and dampen falsehoods.

After a wide swath of the heartland flooded this spring, farmer Joe Sterrenberg of Chatsworth, Ill., could hardly believe his luck when ideal weather in July saved his corn and soybean crop. Then came August. Since the first of August, Sterrenberg has had barely a half-inch of rain. It's as if the gushing spigot that left him with ponds in his fields got shut off at the source. Spring mud has given way to "big old cracks in the ground," he said. Tall stands of corn that were dark green just a few weeks ago now betray the telltale sign of drought stress known as "firing," a yellow and orange streak in the leaves reaching up to the ears.

The America here has no suffering middle class to speak of, just like the America in Denver barely sweats terrorist threats. In Denver's America, George Bush is the president, he's a Republican, and almost everything is his fault. In St. Paul's America, liberals are running and ruining the country, and some guy named George makes a brief cameo from a video screen, never to be heard from again. Americans in St. Paul worry about rising taxes and swelling welfare rolls; in Denver, they worry about global warming and people without health insurance.

By Rick Pearson and John Byrne, Chicago Tribune reporters | August 27, 2012

- Illinois delegates to the Republican National Convention arrived at their hotel to the sounds of a steel drummer beneath a canopy of steel-gray rain clouds on Sunday, a harbinger of the effects of a developing hurricane that already has downsized their activities and created uncertainty for the rest of the event. With Monday's formal program at the Tampa Bay Times Forum canceled because of weather concerns off Florida's west coast, Illinois GOP leaders sought to play down the effects of a building Tropical Storm Isaac that could wind its way toward New Orleans as delegations hold celebrations en route to nominating Mitt Romney for president.

In the end, it was just a glancing blow. And for that, the Big Easy let out a big sigh of relief. A weakened Hurricane Gustav blew into southern Louisiana on Monday morning as a less-fearsome Category 2 storm, bearing 110 m.p.h. winds that cracked tree branches, knocked out power to a million homes and triggered localized flooding, but apparently spared the vulnerable New Orleans levee system. The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Gustav made landfall just before 10 a.m. near the coastal community of Cocodrie, La., about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans in the heart of the state's fishing and oil industry.

All Patryce Jenkins wanted was to walk home. For two days after Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005, Jenkins had wandered the flooded streets of New Orleans, exhausted, hungry, filthy and terrified. She passed bodies. She avoided looters. She skirted the sweltering, violent Louisiana Superdome -- the city's fetid shelter of last resort. Finally, Jenkins made it downtown to the convention center, where she had been told evacuation buses would be waiting, only to discover a sea of tens of thousands of desperate hurricane victims like her, waiting in vain to be rescued.

Portion of Baton Rouge electricity customers who still had no power Wednesday, 10 days after Hurricane Gustav struck. Schools in Louisiana's capital remained closed and more than 817 tons of debris have been removed from its parish. --------- -- Tribune reporter Antonio Olivo and news services